FaceDeer

There are no immediate plans to return the ceremony to the US.

An important detail to note. Once these sorts of things move to a different country, there’s not much reason to go through all the trouble of moving countries again even if Trump is gone and “things go back to normal” in the United States. Why take the hassle of moving from one safe country to another “safe” country? The US isn’t some kind of natural default for these things.

Are you not aware that Snowpiercer is fiction?

I have never been afraid of being falsely accused of assault or rape because I have never done anything even close to anything that can be defined as assault or rape, or shown any behavior or tendencies to do so.

I think you’re missing the basic definition of what a false accusation is, here. The whole point of it is that you didn’t do the thing that you’re being accused of.

To be fair, the vote ratio on the comment I above that I said was being heavily downvoted has now recovered; it initially got hammered with nothing but downvotes but now it’s at about a 2:1 upvote:downvote ratio.

The subjects that get “filtered” vary from community to community, but it’s pretty easy to find non-political topics where it’s clear that there’s no desire to “expose yourself to different viewpoints in general” in most Fediverse communities. You can’t just dismiss them all as being “well that particular viewpoint is just cultist propaganda” without that being exactly the thing I’m pointing out as a problem.

Even more ironically, my point is illustrated by my comment itself. It’s already getting downvoted heavily.

Guess that’s not an opinion that people want to see here, eh?

It was presumably planned to be a three-day special military operation. The people would rise up and support the invaders once the leaders were taken out in the initial decapitation strike.

Ironically, sites like this very one we’re on now seem tailor-made to enhance that effect.

Like what someone said? Upvote and respond with supportive comments. Don’t like it? Downvote, denigrate, block, defederate. Eventually people sort themselves out into communities where they “belong” and stop seeing what other people are saying, and they start to think that everyone shares their views.

But wait, isn’t it all Ohio?

It’s already a bit of a fairy tale to assume that one other NATO member is going to join the United States in this train wreck of a war. Most I would expect is some defensive help for Turkey if it gets caught in the splash zone.

Of course they could do it voluntarily. Anyone can decide to declare war on whomever. What would that have to do with being in NATO though?

This is not a NATO mission. This is not defense. The commitments of membership do not in any way require that NATO members have to lift a finger to help other NATO members prosecute unprovoked wars of aggression.

Apparently there is a mechanism in the basic QR-code-generating algorithm that does something like this.

There are eight different patterns that can be used to display any given QR code’s data. All eight versions get generated internally by the generation software and then they’re assigned scores that penalize them based on various patterns:

• Large monochromatic blocks, anything more than 2x2 pixels of the same colour (white or black)
• Long lines of either colour
• Anything matching the “finder patterns” (the squares at the corners)
• Imbalance between 50% black and white pixels

The best one of the eight is the one that’s actually printed.

So a swastika isn’t explicitly searched for, but given that a swastika is composed of a bunch of long lines a QR code pattern like that would get penalized pretty harshly. The seven other QR codes would have to be even worse for it to slip through, and I bet the odds are pretty low for that.

So, wait, is this a stupid question, then? Should we not be upvoting it? Recursion is tricky.

Not applicable here. NATO is a defensive pact, but America is the aggressor in this case. They can’t invoke Article 5 for this.

Strange times.

It’s serving the will of prudes, religious fruitcakes, inattentive parents, the technologically illiterate, and anyone dumb enough to be taken in by the “think of the children!” Rhetoric of the control-freaks.

Unfortunately this is a rather large constituency.

A British aircraft carrier won’t be enough to do that.

One can be certain that Trump will demand control over Iran’s oil trade, for starters.

Actually for finishers, too. That’s probably all he cares about.

Yeah, they’re just about finished with the original Gaza. They need new ones to replace it.

Yeah, but the fact that they were able to take out a big chunk of second-in-commands and potential successors at the same time doesn’t help the stability much.

That meeting they were having should really have been a Zoom call.